Memorial Day: It’s Not About the Dead Soldiers but About Glorifying War
Although Memorial Day in the United Sates is ostensibly a day for honoring soldiers killed in wars, it is, rather, a day for promoting war. If it were to honor the dead, all its pageantry would be in opposition to war. Rather than being haunted by the ghosts of war, many Americans are very proud of all its soldiers killed while killing foreigners for the military industrial complex and the super-rich who own the country.
For the U.S.A. is a warfare state; it has been waging imperialistic overseas wars for a long, long time, and using its soldiers as cannon fodder. Most families of dead soldiers find it impossible to admit that their loved ones died in vain, even if courageously.
Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. Business goes on as usual.
Remembering all the war dead is like drifting on a ghost ship in a still sea of burning water. Haunted by the eerie silence of their absent presence, if we listen closely enough, we can hear such victims calling to us: Remember me, Remember me, why did it have to be?
“All warfare is ghostly,” writes the classical scholar Norman O. Brown, “every army an exercitus feralis (a funereal exercise), every soldier a living corpse.”
The world is littered with the corpses of wars’ victims, those of the killers and the killed, soldiers of every nation – but the vast majority are innocent civilians who never picked up a gun. The earth is so saturated with all their blood that one would expect the rivers to run red as a reminder. But that only happens in poems, as with Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood.”
But what do poets know that the potentates, politicians, and mad generals don’t? These killers are experts at shedding innocent blood to satisfy their blood lust and then erecting monuments to the killers. They are necrophiliacs, while all the poets do is to remind us that we will all die and that we should affirm life and love eac
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
